No More Fun
Six Flags America became a relic of an all-too-recent age when we all rode rollercoasters while being indoctrinated into a Disney-like version of a common past.
The DC suburbs are now home to an astounding share of our national wealth, thanks in part to Osama bin Laden and the taxpayer-funded paranoia industry he helped to create.
A pestilence of lanternflies.
The decay of the Six Flags America theme park outside Washington, DC, is a painful reminder that America itself may only be a passing moment on the billion-year scale of geologic time. Superman: Ride of Steel is now in danger of being melted into industrial sludge, perhaps to be repurposed as the siding of an Amazon fulfilment center. While the statue of Daffy Duck in a tricorner hat that crowned the fake Independence Hall next to the fake Liberty Bell — discordantly Philly-located landmarks — will be lucky to decorate the lawn of some wealthy Americana enthusiast, to me it’s a no-brainer that The Wild One, until recently the oldest operating rollercoaster in the United States, should be relocated to the National Mall. But this is the dream of a child. The Wild One will be sawdust soon; there is no fantasy that can rescue it, and probably us, from the junkyard.
In the spring of 2025, the …
Jade Divers of Big Sur
Smelly beats, hippies, artists, and bums are drawn to the sacred energy of California’s most coveted coastal region
There, they discovered a magical stone
You want to see what the jade says
Big Sur inspires reverence. When the explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo became the first to sail along the Alta California coastline during the fall of 1542, he was transfixed as oak-laden hills turned mountainous and studded with plentiful conifers, which rose abruptly from the turquoise water like enormous terrestrial swells. “There are mountains which seem to reach the heavens, and the sea beats on them… It appears as though they would fall on the ships,” he wrote aboard his flagship, the San Salvador. Entranced as he was, Cabrillo dared not seek harbor beneath these newfound peaks and instead continued to ride the wind northward.
Later generations of seafaring explorers also tried and failed to penetrate this stretch of coastline — home to a range so rugged, isolated, and unnavigable that the native Esselen people who inhabited these mountains spoke a language uninfluenced by any other …
Agricultural Digest
The most important and undersung word in the English language today and maybe for the rest of the year is going to be, fertilizer. Fertilizer, fertilizer, fertilizer…
In a meta-analysis conducted in 2022 by the journal Global Food Security, researcher Guopeng Liang of Utah State University concluded that fertilizer, especially nitrogen-based fertilizer, is responsible for a 62-percent increase in cereal yields. He also found that the long-term use of fertilizers contributed to the stability of yields, not just increases; meaning that in order to protect global cereal supplies, long-term use is advisable. As such, we may be in for a rough go in the coming months and years because fertilizer prices are climbing — and are likely to go vertical as the world reacts to the crisis in Iran.
As of the last week of March, many of the major fertilizer groups were up in price month …
